You won’t be buying the Vietnam War era horror game ShellShock 2: Blood Trails off the shelf in Australia anytime soon. The Classification Board has refused classification and early reports suggest Atari (who publishes the game in Aus) won’t be resubmitting an edited version. That might change though as Atari has now retracted statements and gone the no comment route.
GameArena reports:
Atari got back to us with a Sonic-fast response on the RC – they haven’t got many details, but the Refused Classification might be related to “post-mortem damage” – kicking an enemy when they’re well and truly down.
Four years ago, ShellShock: Nam ’67 was also refused classification, but an edited version was later submitted an rated MA15+. More on that case at Refused-Classifcation.com.
If you’re thinking of shopping overseas, RC also has a good article on the realities of importing games here.
Games are a small fraction of what is confiscated. In our films database we have over fifty reports of titles being stopped since 2000. In our games database we have one report of a commercial quantity of a banned game being stopped. Now we are in no way condoning that you should go out and import RC games, we are simply stating all the information that we have.
